The Pursuit of Harpyness » Identityhttp://www.harpyness.com
As narrated by the most charming and vicious women on the internetSat, 29 Sep 2012 11:37:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.5Booknotes: The Straight Statehttp://www.harpyness.com/2012/05/03/booknotes-the-straight-state/
http://www.harpyness.com/2012/05/03/booknotes-the-straight-state/#commentsThu, 03 May 2012 12:00:58 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=22332

Modern-day campaigns for civil rights and equal citizenship for queer folks tend to conjure up a progressive trajectory from exclusion to inclusion: from a dark past when the homosexual was excluded from equal citizenship (or forced to live closeted) to a not-yet-realized future in which one’s sexual identity, desires, and behaviors, do not exclude one from enjoying the rights and responsibilities of the American citizenry. The ability to apply for citizenship in the first place, the responsibility to serve in the armed forces, the personhood status to form legally-recognized kinship networks and access the welfare benefits distributed through those kinship systems. In our collective memory, we look backward in time to a period during which homosexual acts were illegal and homosexual identity stigmatized; we look forward to a period during which our bodies and relationships won’t ipso facto criminalize us (at worst) or shuffle us off as second-class or invisible citizens (still a precarious state of affairs).

Yet as Hanne Blank pointed out, in her recently-releasedStraight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, the notion of the heterosexual being (in opposition to the homosexual being) only developed in the late nineteenth century. While certain sexual activities (most obviously sodomy, commonly interpreted as anal penetration) were criminalized, the homosexual person was not constituted in either cultural or legal understanding until well into the twentieth century. In The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009), historian Margot Canaday argues, in fact, that the identity category of “homosexual” developed in symbiosis with the United States’ state-building activities to such an extent that it was, in part, the legal conception of homosexual persons that led to the mid-century emergence of our modern-day gay or queer political identities:

An increasingly invasive state would in time also help to create rights consciousness for some queer individuals who, embracing the state’s own emphasis on legal rather than medical categories, began to ask not whether they might be sick, but whether they might be citizens. They came to agree with the state’s simple common sense definition of homosexuality, then, but could see less and less that was commonsensical about its placement outside national citizenship (254).

This is a fascinating argument, well-grounded in historical evidence. Canaday’s footnotes exhaustively document the hours she spent in the National Archives reading through years worth of military court marshals, personnel files, proceedings from immigration hearings, congressional records, and Works Progress Administration memoranda. What this detailed historical research reveals is how much our “common sense definition of homosexuality” was created through a process of trial and error, through attempts to police the bodies and social lives of those individuals coded undesirable. In example, let me glean from Canaday’s evidence a few instances of such creation that I found particularly delightful and thought-provoking.

First, in her chapter on immigration and “perverse” bodies during the first quarter of the twentieth century, Canaday discovered in reading INS records that aliens were generally turned away at the border or deported not for homosexual acts but for gender non-conformity. This is merely the most recent book in my readings on the history and politics of sex and gender that has made me think about how much policing of our sexual lives speaks to a (larger?) fear of bodies that fail to fit our ever-changing yet stubbornly dualistic notions of appropriate gender performance. As Tanya Erzen observes in her study of ex-gay conversion therapy literature, for people and institutions concerned with gender role divisions, same-sex sexual behavior becomes a marker of gender inversion or confusion, rather than something of primary concern. That is, a woman who has sex with another woman is worrying because she is becoming masculine or enacting a “male” role. Not because she’s enjoying same-sex sex in and of itself.

Along similar lines, Canaday suggests that those policing same-sex sexual acts among men in the military, particularly during the early years of the twentieth century, distinguished between men who penetrated during sex (the “male” role) and men who were — willingly or unwillingly — penetrated either orally or anally (the “female” role). Rather than imagining lovemaking as a more fluid series of encounters in which one might penetrate and be penetrated in turn, military police imagined that men’s sexual identities were constituted and static. To some extent, they were following the lead of the men whose activities they were punishing, since barracks culture appears to have encouraged the tom/bottom hierarchical dynamic. However, Canaday’s narrative suggests that the policing of same-sex sex, and the differential punishment meted out according to who fucked whom reinforced the notion that what one did somehow followed from (or led to) who one was. It made me wonder if, in these military proceedings, we were seeing the nascent beginnings of our modern-day notion (in some circles) that gay men are either “tops” or “bottoms.”

While the military was fairly clear about the illegality of same-sex acts between men (though their policing of such activity was uneven), some of the most hilarious passages in the book deal with the inability of military police to agree on what exactly women do together when making love. The perplexity with which society responds to lesbian sex never fails to amuse me. Is it really that difficult to understand? Seriously? Like — clits and tongues and fingers and natural lubricant? Hello? But apparently, for mid-century MPs, women doing it was just beyond the realm of possibility. When, in 1952, two military police on patrol happened across two women having energetic oral sex in the back of a vehicle, they were so “bewildered” by what was happening that they turned and went away in “shock.” “It was just one of those things that you read about and hear about but never see,” one of the MPs admitted during testimony when asked why the incident had gone unreported (191-192). Because of this mystification of female sexuality, Canaday demonstrates, the anti-gay purges of women in the military relied not on evidence of acts (as it did with men) but on extensive documentation of women’s homosociality, emotional ties, and gender performance. Canaday observes that, while men and women alike were harassed during the lavender scare (see David K. Johnson), discharge files for men are typically 1/4-1/2 inch thick while women’s routinely run 2-3 inches. Not a commentary on the relative suffering of men and women accused of homosexuality, this difference represents the comparable difficulty of evidence gathering when what you’re trying to document is something as nebulous as tendencies and identities rather than trying to answer the question of whether so-and-so gave John Smith a blow job.

Finally, in her two chapters on the Depression-era welfare state, Canaday explores the long-term effects of structuring the social safety net in such a way as to reinforce the heteronormative family. A precursor to the destructive obsession with marriage as an alternative to unemployment and welfare benefits, federal programs targeting the unemployed and itinerant in the 1930s, and the benefits of the G.I. Bill post-WWII, became tied to an individual’s ability and/or willingness to fulfill a role (mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter) within the ideal “straight” family. While this had little per se to do with one’s sexual identity, it had everything to do with domesticating individual human beings whose free-floating sexual desires were closely associated with criminality. Work programs for unemployed men, for example, often included some sort of requirement that the individual’s monthly allotment be sent to a designated “dependent,” usually a family member along the order of a parent, a wife, or children (118). Some “unattached” men were able to work around this requirement by designating a male friend as their dependent, but overall the government structured twentieth-century benefits schemes to encourage hetero-familial ties and discourage both sustained single-ness and unorthodox relationships. In the postwar era, this structural dis-incentive was joined by overt discrimination as those who had been discharged from the military for homosexuality were denied veterans benefits and experienced widespread stigma and economic hardship for suspected or actual same-sex attractions, behavior, and relationships.

Overall, Canaday’s study is one of the most impressive examples of historical inquiry into sex and gender that I’ve read in recent years, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the historical context of our present-day notions of gender, sex, sexual orientation, and citizenship.

Until I fell in love with my partner, Hanna, I generally conceptualized myself as “mostly straight.” This was because, despite the passionate friendships I formed with female friends and the way lesbian sexual fantasies made me go all squishy with excitement, I didn’t feel I was queer enough to be considered authentically out of bounds of straightness. And I passively imagined that, given the statistical odds, chances were I’d fall in love with a person who was a cisgendered man (although I wouldn’t have used the term “cisgendered” back then).

Then Hanna came along, and I realized I was falling for her, and then we were together, a couple in the world, and I had to develop a whole new vocabulary for talking about myself: “mostly straight” no longer felt accurate. But was I lesbian? bisexual? fluid? queer? Should I articulate my sexuality in terms of my kinky fantasies? The gender identity and sexual orientation of my partner? The aggregate attractions I’ve felt but never acted upon for people across the gender and sexuality spectrum? If I’m a person who’s felt squishy feelings for people who identify as male, female, trans, gay, bi, straight, and numerous combinations of the above … how meaningful is it to try and identify something inherently personal (one’s subjective sense of self) in terms of the objects of my affection (which are multivariant, ever-changing). In a strange way, the language I choose to speak of myself has an effect on the identities of anyone I’ve ever felt the thrill of sexual excitement over.

It’s a social dilemma that, three years later, I’ve yet to resolve. These days, when filling out forms I go for the string-of-words approach. The form asks Sexual Orientation? I respond: “lesbian/bisexual/fluid” or the like. Check boxes be damned. In a pinch, “bisexual” is probably the best catch-all (I register attraction to people of multiple gender expressions and sex identities). In biomedical terms, “lesbian” is probably the most accurate in that I’m in a monogamous relationship with a cisgendered woman — so our medical needs will be those of women who have sex exclusively with women. But that isn’t all of who I am — or who my partner is, for that matter, since she identifies as bisexual. “Fluid” helps capture some of the contextual nature of my sexual desires, and my sense of personal change over time. But will provide little information to my primary care provider that “lesbian” doesn’t already communicate — with much less room for confusion.

When blogging or speaking informally, I’ll use lesbian, dyke, bi, gay, queer, fluid, or sometimes opt for phrasing that’s less about who I am and more about what I do: “As someone in a lesbian relationship…,” “As someone who’s partnered with another woman …”

Hanne Blank, in her recently-published (long anticipated!) Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon Press, 2012) recounts similar dilemmas of self-identification as the partner of a male-identified person whose markers of sex and gender are, nonetheless, all over the biological map due to having been born with XXY chromosomes. The author of Virgin: An Untouched History returns to historical and cultural notions of human sexuality in an effort to illuminate what we mean when we talk about “heterosexual” or “straight” identity. As with “virgin,” the answer turns out to be murky at best. The concept of an individual whose identity or nature was built, at least in part, around an exclusive attraction to “opposite”-sexed partners and activities, only came into being in relation to the study of non-normative or “deviant” sexual behavior during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even after the term came into common usage, virtually no research has been done — scientific or otherwise — on heterosexual sexuality. We don’t know how the bodies of heterosexuals differ from those of non-heterosexuals, for example. Research on homosexuality suggests there is no marker of sexual orientation on the body, but no one has ever asked the question “How are heterosexual bodies composed?” Scientists studying non-heterosexuality always assume they know the normal against which they are measuring the non-normal. Yet this assumption is never spelled out, and its markers are never articulated. As Blank writes:

Scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this is precisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists (42-43).

The reason why we’ve never inquired into the existence of heterosexuality is that, culturally speaking, it is a category of being that has become commonsensical, so self-evident in our minds that we measure every other sexuality in relation to it. There is power in a category so constructed as simultaneously normative and empty of actual definition. Blank compares heterosexuality to the concept of being not a person of color or not a slut. “Nameless and characterless, the space we can loosely categorize as ‘normal’ is almost completely undefined,” she writes (32):

This is why ‘slut’ and ‘prude, ‘pervert’ and ‘deviant’ all work so well as insults and as ways to police the boundaries of sex doxa [an anthropological term meaning "what everyone knows to be true"]. The labels are effortless to deploy, and hard, even impossible, to defend against … The opposite of ‘slut’ is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa (32).

If there is a weakness in Straight is is the emphasis on marriage and reproduction as signs of heterosexual identity. I understand why Blank draws upon these cultural examples of heterosexual life — both marriage and parenting are more social activities than, typically, sexual behavior. People are far more likely to record instances of the former rather than the latter. So from an historical perspective, research on heterosexuality will end up documenting those outward signs with much more confidence than it will what people actually did with their bits (and how they felt about doing it). Unless people talk about their sexual self-identities, it’s hard to do more than catalog instances in which sexual acts were recorded — and those acts were usually the ones considered deviant, exceptional, worthy or note or censure.

Still, other books have been written in recent years on the history of marriage, and I felt myself starting to skim in hopes of more discussion of sexological research and taxonomy, a more inventive backward reading from those instances of “deviance” toward what people considered not-deviant. Some of that does appear in the pages of Straight, but I found myself wishing Blank’s editor had pushed her to include less of the well-trodden history of marital practice and more of the specifically sexual practices that fell within the bounds of the acceptable. She does argue, at one point, that “penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure that has never, so far as we can tell from the historical record, has never been challenged … the fortunes of all other sex acts and all other sources of sexual pleasure, have varied widely” (124). I would have liked to see that assertion expanded on, to have these boundaries of sexual activity discussed in relation to the notion of sexual identity in historical understanding. In the 1890s, for example, would a husband and wife who practiced cunnilingus and fellatio with one another been categorized as “normal-sexual” in the eyes of the early sexologists? Blank leaves much of that open to further discussion — which may, I admit, have been her intent.

In the end, Blank has written yet another accessible survey of a sexual concept we think we all know and instead, it turns out, we know little about. I hope the liveliness of her prose and the concrete examples she provides of individuals who defy our binary sex, gender, and sexual categories (man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans) will encourage people who may not have thought human sexuality in such complex terms to revisit their assumptions and look at their own identities and behaviors with new, and perhaps more forgiving and expansive, eyes.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2012/03/27/booknotes-straight/feed/4Booknotes: Nearly-Vacation Round-Uphttp://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/28/booknotes-nearly-vacation-round-up/
http://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/28/booknotes-nearly-vacation-round-up/#commentsTue, 28 Feb 2012 11:28:02 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=22132Once again I’ve managed to pile up a whole stack of books that handwriting’s on the wall I won’t make the time to properly review. Either I don’t have enough to say about them, or the thoughts are too disparate to form a coherent narrative, or I’ve had to return them to the library, etc. And so as Hanna and I are gathering ourselves for a trip to Michigan next week, I thought I’d pull together another list of not-quite-booknotes for stuff I’ve been reading.

Tuesday Teasers will be back in two weeks’ time on March 13th!

Bright, Susie and Rachel Kramer Bussel, eds. | Best Sex Writing 2012 (Cleis Press, 2012). Susie Bright frames this year’s anthology in the following way: “On one side of the current sex news we have the orgasm guru, the pleasure benefactor, the inspirational bohemian … the writers of these pieces describe an erotic identity unfettered by shame, a marvel in all its variety, the authentic glue that keeps us going, both literally and philosophically … [on the other side] fearmongers of our 21st-century Gilded Age are fanatical about social control through sex, largely using women and young children as bait” (viii). So, you know, she obviously has a perspective! But it’s Susie Bright, so what did you expect, and for the most part I’m on board with that perspective, so I’m willing to hop on for the ride. It was a good collection, but in a lot of ways made me sad about how unable we are as a culture to talk about and appreciate human sexuality. You can check out the anthology’s full table of contents, read Rachel Kramer Bussel’s introduction, and watch a web video book trailer over at the book website.

Clarke, Ted | Brookline, Allston-Brighton, and the Renewal of Boston (The History Press, 2010). Growing up and living in the same town for twenty-seven years, I took for granted knowing the basic contours of local history. I’ve lived here in Boston since 2007 — working at the Massachusetts Historical Society no less! — and what with one thing and another still know relatively little about the history of the Boston metropolitan area. But I’ve been working on a research project recently that’s actually pushed me to delve a bit more into local history. More on that eventually, when I’ve got the paper written, but in the meantime it was fun to spend an afternoon reading Ted Clarke’s brief overview of Boston and its relationship to Brookline and Allston-Brighton, both of which I spend a lot of time in. Lack of footnotes and a bibliography make me take Clarke’s historical narrative with a grain of salt, but reading his book has prompted me to consider more deeply the history of the area I now call home.

Michaelson, Jay | God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon Press, 2011). Part of the Queer Action/Queer Ideas series edited by Michael Bronski, Michaelson’s God vs. Gay, as the subtitle suggests, makes a “religious case” for recognizing queer sexuality as part of the variety of God’s creation. An observant Jew with a background in New Testament scholarship, Michaelson admits up-front that he’ll focus on Judeo-Christian tradition. What I like best about this slim volume is its emphasis not so much on how homophobic interpretations of scripture are incorrect and ahistorical (though he covers that), but about the religious injunctions toward lovingkindness for humanity. “Loneliness is the first problem of creation,” Michaelson writes, “and love comes to solve it” (6). While this book is not likely to convince the Biblical literalist, it may give sex-positive religious folks some new, and possibly more effective, language to talk about why human sex, gender, and sexual diversity can be part of religious life rather than a departure from it.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth | Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (Yale U.P., 2012). I picked up psychoanalyst Young-Bruehl’s book hoping for a good systemic analysis of the social marginalization (and simultaneous idealization/objectification) of young people in our culture. Indeed, Young-Bruehl’s goal in writing the book was to introduce the term “childism” as something equivalent to “sexism” or “racism” that would help us identify the patterns of age-based prejudice and stereotyping which lead to age-segregation, intolerance, and inequality. Frustratingly, this is not that book. As a therapist and theorist whose work focused primarily on children who were subject to physical and emotional abuse, Young-Bruehl’s narrative actually works against her desire to convince her audience that age-based prejudice against young people is a thing in the world. Her examples are so obvious and horrific (children who were sexually abused by family members, gross neglect, etc.) that readers not already thinking in terms of inequality will say, “Yes, of course that’s wrong! Children should be protected!” but likely fail to examine their own every-day prejudices about children’s ability to participate in society. In addition, her rhetoric and examples are, for obvious reasons, wrapped up in psychoanalytic language and often in response to very specific developments within the professional fields in which she practiced. Hopefully, this book will speak to her fellow practitioners and shift the debate in healthy directions. However, to the non-specialized reader she comes off out of touch with the parents and activists who have been speaking out regularly on this issue consistently in online spaces and through real-world actions (like protests against the freak-outs over breastfeeding in public). For an introduction to the concept of age-based prejudice, I’d recommend Helping Teens Stop Violence, Build Community, and Stand For Justice.

Younge, Gary | Who Are We — and Should It Matter in the Twenty-First Century? (Nation Books, 2011). English-born journalist Gary Younge explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of our identities, politicized and otherwise. I admit that I was a bit wary, given the title of this book, that Younge’s thesis would be reduced to a call for the end to “identity politics” — but Who Are We is much more than that. Even though the text wanders at times, I found his thoughtful treatment of the many ways in which we invoke our many-layered identities (and society invokes them for us, sometimes contrary to our own self-understanding) to be extremely nuanced and articulate. Growing up black and working-class in England during the 1970s, Younge has a clear understanding of how inequality shapes self-awareness: “Those who feel without identity [the powerful] do not see the need to meet people halfway and thereby fail to recognize that everyone else is doing all the traveling” (45). He eloquently treats such thorny subjects as the present-day use of the term “political correctness,” questions of intersectionality (how pitting “African-American” against “woman” in the oppression olympics ignores the existence of people who are both), and the importance of honoring self-definition: “We should honor self-definition not to humor the subject but because it is infinitely preferable to allowing anyone to be defined by others” (84). I’d highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how our self-identities and community affiliations become politicized — and how those politics can both support and detract from the quest for equality.

Nestle, Joan | A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings (Cleis Press, 1998).A Fragile Union brings together a series of fiction and non-fiction pieces by lesbian activist Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (one of the largest community-based archives chronicling queer women’s history in the world \o/). Published over a decade ago, when Nestle was with colon cancer, this work stands as a fractured memoir, bringing together pieces reflecting back into her mid-twentieth-century adolescence, the early years of gay liberation, and feminist activism, and forward into the future of queer identities and practices. Given my reading list over the past few months, I particularly appreciated the moments at which Nestle’s experiences overlap and converse with the work of others in her cohort, such as Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia. And for obvious reasons, I hold a special place in my heart for the anyone who has done as much as Nestle to ensure the survival of primary source materials on queer women’s lives for future generations to plunder for story-telling, history-making potential.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/28/booknotes-nearly-vacation-round-up/feed/3Quick Hit: Gay Men and Feminismhttp://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/23/quick-hit-gay-men-and-feminism/
http://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/23/quick-hit-gay-men-and-feminism/#commentsThu, 23 Feb 2012 17:57:07 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=22122It was a happy day yesterday when my latest issue of Bitch magazine (no. 54: “The Frontier Issue”) arrived in the mail. While I get so much of my “feminist response to pop culture” on the Internets these days, there’s something truly pleasurable about curling up every few months with the latest issue of Bitch and perusing the book reviews and feature articles off-line.

The feature book review / author interview in this issue is by Jessica Hoffmann (of make/shift), interviewing author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about her new book Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? (AK Press, 2012). Much of the interview is taken up with a great conversation about the way in which mainstreaming the movement for gay civil rights is built upon the continued marginalization of folks unable or unwilling to “play straight”: that is, perform socially according to heteronormative expectations, even if you’re technically out of the closet in terms of the objects of your desire. As Hoffman observes:

If the path to the place where “it gets better” is to look and act like a straight white dude — married, moneyed, and powerful in institutions ranging from business to the U.S. military — where does that leave people who can’t or don’t want to fit into that mold? And does feminism have anything to offer a conversation about faggotry and fear?

The article isn’t available online, but I highly recommend heading on down to your local news stand, public library, or bookstore of choice to check out the piece! I know I’m headed directly from writing this blog post to my public library’s inter-library loan page to see if I can’t find a copy of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? somewhere in the system.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2012/02/23/quick-hit-gay-men-and-feminism/feed/8“I’m Not Straight, I’m Not Gay, I’m With You”: What Does Orientation Mean to YOU?http://www.harpyness.com/2011/09/01/what-does-orientation-mean/
http://www.harpyness.com/2011/09/01/what-does-orientation-mean/#commentsThu, 01 Sep 2011 12:00:06 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=20877Because the point is logically moot, as I’m never having it off with anyone else ever again. I’m not straight, I’m not gay, I’m with you. How do I get it through that skull of yours? I’m…John-sexual. Oh, bloody hell, you’re mine, you said I could have you, you did. You promised.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the personal and political implications of talking about sexual “orientation” rather than sexual behavior, sexual desires, sexual relations, or other ways of getting at what we humans do when we engage with that part of our existence. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and have more questions than answers, I’m gonna share some of those thoughts with you.

A few disclaimers before we get started: I want to be clear from the get-go that these opinions are only my own and are highly subjective in that they’re closely related to my own experience of sexuality, identity, and desire. I recognize that lots of people have found the idea of sexual orientation to be extremely useful both politically and personally, and I have little interest challenging that framework wholesale. At the same time, I find it an increasingly limited and unsatisfying way to talk about our sexual selves — and I’m interested in throwing some of my reasons out there for discussion and debate.

In the same vein, please be mindful that questions of sexuality are intimately connected to questions of identity for most people, and speak as much as possible from your own perspective rather than making generalized statements about what works or doesn’t work, what’s valid or invalid, for everyone.

All that having been said, here are some initial thoughts before I open the floor for discussion:

What does the concept of “sexual orientation” mean to you? When I use the term sexual orientation I generally mean someone’s (supposedly) innate attractions. Whether we identify those attractions as originating from one’s physiology, from environmental factors, or psychological make-up, when we talk about “orientation” we mean something that has a certain fixity. Something that remains constant over time for that individual person — it is our orientation toward others and the world outside our skin. The concept of sexual orientation has been the dominant framework for understanding human sexuality in recent decades, and has been particularly useful as a way of pushing back against conservative voices that argue that same-sex relations are “unnatural” and are pathological behaviors that can (and should) be changed. The sexual orientation model allows us to insist that same-sex sexuality (as well as other types of sexual feeling — i.e. asexuality, object sexuality, etc.) are innate and therefore “natural.” Rather than focusing on behavior (what we humans do to express our sexuality) we’ve focused on intrinsic sexuality: the idea that our sexual identity is a core part of who we are in the world, distinct from how we act.

For a long time I took the idea of sexual orientation for granted. I grew up in an area where, and an era when, to be a supporter of same-sex sexuality as a valid expression of erotic love meant to believe that human beings were “born this way.” It mean believing that human beings were somehow hard-wired to find certain types of bodies attractive and not others. It’s the obvious rejoinder to arguments that same-sex romantic affection or sexual activity is somehow unnatural, a deliberate perversion of normal human behavior. I think this concept is so familiar to us that we forget it is a relatively modern framework for speaking of human sexuality (the focus on identity versus behavior).

The concept of “orientation” doesn’t work so well for me, personally. While it was obviously awesome that I grew up in a time and place that recognized the validity of same-sex attractions as well as other-sex desires, I’d argue that living in a culture which framed sexuality as either homo-, bi-, and heterosexual was a major stumbling block for me when it came to learning about the way my sexuality functioned. I was confused by the fact I didn’t fit into a tidy identity box, and nervous (sometimes I still am!) that I wasn’t enough of whatever orientation I thought I might be to convince other people of its validity. I’ve written before about coming to think about my sexuality as person-centered and fluid, but some people still argue that fluidity itself is an orientation — distinct from being lesbian, bisexual, straight, etc. So I could claim “fluid” as an identity, but is it possible to claim non-fixity as a fixed part of your core being? What are the implications of arguing that some people are “oriented” or hard-wired for change over time while others are hard-wired for fixity? How could we tell which population any given person was a part of until they’d lived their whole life — at which point, would such identification even matter? Yes, I use orientation terms for myself: “bisexual,” “lesbian,” etc. But mostly it’s short-hand. If push came to shove, I would say of myself: I am a being in a loving, sexually-intimate relationship with another being. That’s my orientation: My relationship with Hanna. If (heaven forefend) we chose to go our separate ways at some point, I would be not-in-a-relationship-sexual. Until I found someone else with whom I fit. Hopefully this will be a moot point for the rest of my life.

And while some folks find it useful for self-identification and community formation, it also seems like the fixity of sexual attractions starts to break down fairly quickly. Take, for example, the recent work on sexual fluidity [link?], or the increasing popularity of the catch-all term “queer” to denote someone of non-straight, non-heteronormative sex and/or gender identity. At the same time that new orientations are being constructed (and, yes, I would argue deserve to be recognized), they’re also challenging the very concept of a sexual orientation itself. Take, for example, the recent post by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com about asexuality. Clark-Flory simultaneously frames asexuality as a sexual orientation, while also pointing out (in the words of AVEN founder David Jay himself) that asexuality is in some ways an exercise in re-defining what role human sexuality plays in identity- and community formation.

This isn’t exactly new: the granddaddy of modern sex research, Kinsey himself, shied away from sexual identity and orientation, instead talking about discrete sex acts. The Kinsey scale, which has come to be used as a language of identity (i.e. “I’m a Kinsey 6″) was not constructed to sort by self-conception at all, but rather express behavior: One’s position on the scale related to the type of sexual activites one engaged in, and was subject to change over time.

The framework of “orientation” also seems limited in its political usefulness. Last week, there was some drama across the queer blogosphere concerning a new scientific study of male sexual response that was being sold to the public as “confirmation” that bisexuality exists. Obviously a number of bisexual men were insulted that scientific authority was deemed necessarily to recognize their sexual experience as valid; some scientists in turn were frustrated that their data was seen as insulting. There was some good discussion of this difference in perception over at Emily Nagoski’s ::sex nerd:: blog. As commenter Melinda wrote there:

Science doesn’t exist in a void. You don’t have something pure and magical called science and then far over there you have activism and politics and opinions. (And it’s not like categories and narratives of sexual orientation aren’t socially constructed in a way that may not best reflect reality, something Lisa Diamond has explored in her research.) It’s way more intermixed than that, and I think it’s just plain wrong to suggest that science isn’t political. The politics of science might be manifested in the motivations behind a study, its methodology, its conclusions, its framing, its impact. In this case you have a study whose conclusions are VERY political. Of course you’re going to have people who are offended. Saying, “Guess what—You exist! We proved it!” is inherently offensive.

I don’t think it’s fair to be angry at anyone for being insulted by a study that’s…well… insulting. I think it’s good they did the study, because it’s better than the other terrible studies out there, but it’s still offensive that the question of whether a socially constructed group exists is a matter of debate, and that science is deemed the *only* reasonable way of answering it.

It’s not that you have all these unreasonable political people who just don’t “get” science.

If you want science, ask scientific questions. “Do bisexual people exist?” isn’t a scientific question; it’s a political one.

Chally, over at Zero at the Bone, also wrote a beautifully articulate piece about this recently, in which she pointed out that basing the argument for equal rights on the assertion one is “born this way” is fairly weak and limited ground to stand on:

I have a weird feeling this post is ripping off The History of Sexuality in some way I can’t locate just now – if so, consider yourself acknowledged, Foucault!

I’m troubled by the proliferation of “I was born this way” as a means of justifying otherness. I don’t think otherness has to be justified, for a start. Additionally, it reads like an attempt to prove innocence – I can’t be blamed for the way I’ve always been! – as though any other way of coming into otherness would be criminal. Apart from all that, why does it matter if one was born a particular way or not?

What this assertion implies is that otherness is less legitimate if it is a choice, or if it’s something one hasn’t experienced from birth. I’m thinking particularly of trans and queer people, and how many are often met with ‘you shouldn’t be choosing that,’ and return with ‘it wasn’t a choice’. This narrative says that there are possibilities, good and bad, and if the one socially coded as bad isn’t chosen, it isn’t bad. The implication remains that it would be if it was chosen, and only as innocent victim does the other merit equal integration into society. That’s not ground I want to give up. I think otherness should be okay, however it comes about. If it comes about later in life, well, people change and people realise and people choose different labels, and that should be okay.

The political implications of the “orientation” framework also came up in the discussion of some pedophile’s attempts to re-frame their sexual attractions as a distinct orientation. See Kristin Rawls’ guest post, and the 250+ comment thread, at Feministe (obvious trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault of children) for a fascinating example of how differing concepts of “orientation” and sexual identity have real political consequences.

And finally, I’ve written in the past about the dangers of relying on the “born this way” frame for our sexual desires:

If queer activists rely solely on the “it’s biology” argument, we miss the opportunity to make a moral and ethical case for same-sex relationships, and the capacity of those relationships to add to the sum total of joy and well-being in the world. This is a message much more radical, when you stop to think about it, than scientific debates over the origins of human sexual orientation. Those scientific explorations are stimulating from an intellectual perspective, but will not satisfy our desire as human beings to discern right from wrong. A scientific answer to the question of where same-sex desire originates may inform, but cannot dictate, what we do with those desires.

So Harpies – help me out here! Has the concept of sexual orientation been useful to you in a personal or political way? How so? Has it ever felt limiting or damaging, either in terms of your own sexuality or in terms of the political struggle for equal rights? How accurate do you think “orientation” is as a descriptor of the way human sexuality manifests itself in our lives? Does your sexuality play a major role in your identity, or is it something that you feel is less central to your concept of self?

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2011/09/01/what-does-orientation-mean/feed/21Acting Queer: Dis-jointed Thoughts on “Playing Gay”http://www.harpyness.com/2011/08/11/acting-queer-dis-jointed-thoughts/
http://www.harpyness.com/2011/08/11/acting-queer-dis-jointed-thoughts/#commentsThu, 11 Aug 2011 12:00:15 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=20687A couple of weeks ago, I was stuck on a crowded subway car on my way home from work next to two college-age folks, a young man with a guitar and his female friend who (I gathered from overhearing their conversation) was coming home from a shift at a clothing retailer. The conversation went like this:

Him: How was work?

Her: Okay. Slow. We were, like, $700 behind sales on the last hour. The floor manager told us, she was like, “just so you all know we’re $700 behind.”

Him: That sucks.

Her: Yeah. [pause] I did sell a pair of these jeans [indicates the pair she's wearing] to a 40-year-old lesbian.

Him: Yeah?

Her: A 40-year-old British lesbian. I flirted with her. I do that all the time. Flirt with the lesbians.

At the time, what I really wanted to do was interrupt their conversation and ask her how, exactly, she identified the lesbian shoppers. I mean, I was curious! How does one figure these things out? If she has such un-erring gaydar, could she tell I was queer, standing there next to her on the T? Inquiring minds wish to know!

Then my mind wandered, as my mind is wont to do, and I thought about how I was irritated with this girl for slumming as a lesbian in order to sell pants. “Just for the record,” I wanted to say, “I’m a queer chick who doesn’t find those pants or your ass particularly hot. So quit your pretending and just be your fucking self.” (Yes, sometimes the inside of my head can be a cruel space.)

And then I thought about how maybe this girl, like lots of “straight” girls, is using the space of this job as a salesgirl to try on the idea of being a lesbian. To see if it fit. (Sometimes that’s the only way you’ll know.) I mean, it was clear from the way she phrased it to her friend that she positioned herself as straight … but then again, maybe this friend was just an acquaintence and maybe she’s not sure, and maybe it’s just easier to tell the story about flirting with an older woman as if she was playacting and didn’t really mean it. Maybe if she tells herself the story a few more times, she’ll gradually feel brave enough to position herself a little less on the play-acting side and a little more on the honest-to-god flirting side.

When does slumming count as slumming and when does it count as … well, just plain discovering what you want and who you are?

James Hathaway (Lawrence Fox) and Robert Lewis (Kevin Whatley) of "Inspector Lewis."

I was reminded of the exchange overheard on the T a few days later when I read a post by Garland Grey about the increasing number of straight actors who play non-straight or ambiguous (as characters or even as themselves), usually on the clear understanding that they’re not really queer but are playing at queerness to make a sale or please the fans. He writes:

I think actors choosing to acknowledge the slash community is somewhat funny and occasionally hot. And I think their choosing to interact with narratives that other people have constructed about their sex lives with a certain degree of humor is very mature. But it also highlights how much of the cultural bandwidth Straight Men playing or imitating Gay Men is starting to take up, and how lucrative being ambiguously heteroflexible can be in securing more of the fandom’s attention, giving another segment of your audience a reason to see a film or series and bring their own queer sensibilities to it. Partly this is an act of collaborative storytelling that acknowledges how underrepresented gender and sexual minorities are as main characters in Science Fiction/Fantasy. But it also begs the question: Why can’t we have legitimate queer couplings? Why must we always manufacture them ourselves and hope for crumbs from the actors and producers?

It’s two slightly different situations, but with fundamentally the same questions being asked: when someone (assumed to be straight) play-acts at being (in some way not-straight), to what extent is that acting appropriating the sexual desires of actual non-straight individuals, and to what extent are they perhaps acknowledging their own fluidity or ambiguity of desire. And does it matter on a political or cultural level that these incidents happen? It it does, then how so? On the one hand, in the context of acting as a profession it’s understood that folks take on roles that may or may not approximate their real-life experience (queer actors play straight roles, I would hazard, more often than they play non-straight ones). So perhaps we could say it’s more acceptable in that context? On the other hand, a shopgirl playing gay to make a sale has a much smaller stage on which to act, and one could argue is more likely performing the role out of some desire to try on the persona than an actor who’s being paid a healthy salary in part because he can pull off sexually ambiguous (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock anyone?) On the third hand, Grey assumes in his post above that simply because an actor is in an other-sex relationship and/or doesn’t publicly identify as gay that he’s a Straight Guy playing gay … when who’s to say that the role of, say, James Hathaway in Inspector Lewis, can’t offer the same space to try out sexual desires as flirting with a lesbian customer does for a young woman who assumes she’s straight?

I told you this was a post full of dis-jointed thoughts.

As a parting thought, I bring you a second post — this one by Shoshie at Feministe, who is writing about her experience of pansexual desires in the context of a committed other-sex partnership:

I feel like my sexuality is this weird, awkward thing that sits quietly in the corner until someone assumes that everyone there is straight, and then it has a big ol’ awkward party. It’s become a big question for me, whether or not to come out to people that I meet. Because, at this point, what difference does it make? What does it matter who I’m attracted to? Mr. Shoshie and I are monogamous, so I’m with one person for the foreseeable future. But then, sexuality does come up occasionally and then I feel weird because here’s this person that I’m friends with, that I’ve known for a year, who knows so much about me, but doesn’t know that I also like people who aren’t men. And who I find attractive shouldn’t be a big deal, but somehow it is anyways.

You can read the whole thing (and the long and interesting comment thread!) over at Feministe.

This post doesn’t really have a conclusiony-type conclusion. It’s just that all of these things — the conversation on the T, the relationship of actor to the slash factor in their fandom, the awkwardness Shoshie experiences over being honest about her attractions — point toward the tensions we feel about folks exploring their sexual orientation(s) and identities. We get angry or frustrated over the appropriation of sexual minority identities by presumed-straight folks in order to get attention of various kinds. We get angry or frustrated when the categories we’ve constructed don’t seem to fit our personal experience or allow people to suggest that we should know our desires and stick with them consistently. I realize there are important realities about structural power and institutionalized privilege present in any conversation about straight and non-straight identities and desires, but at the same time I think with increasing frequency that we should just back off our reflexive judging of other peoples’ sexual exploration (i.e. the sort of judging I did of the girl on the T), and actually encourage more fluidity of identity — because the more fluidity there is, the less likely it will be that any one static group of people will end up dominating the discussion. If everyone is (or has been) in the position of feeling “queer” at some point in their lives, perhaps we will stop assuming as a culture that everyone is straight until they announce otherwise, and that once having announced (or otherwise displayed) their desires they should stick with that decision for the rest of their lives.

I all too often feel in these moments that language leaves people in the position of two ships passing in the night with running lights off. I often want to say, “If you would give me a half hour of your time, I could explain it better, and then you wouldn’t be sad.” What I want to do is show them that sensuality and sexuality can be teased apart, and that, if they are honest, both form the underpinnings of how they enjoy their lives and bodies and those of their lovers. If I could just have that time, I could then grasp onto the concept of sensuality and inject it into their notion of asexuality. I could finally combat the notion that asexuality necessarily means not desiring romantic love, shared vulnerability, mutually unfolding mystery, and yes, physical pleasure. However, I very rarely have the half hour that I need, nor do I have an audience willing to chart those waters. Thus, my needs find themselves defined via the label “sensual,” but only internally.

I’d like to take these last two paragraphs to stake out some territory for my own internal label. I’m letting this little buddy out into the light of day. As I usually say right around this point, this is ONLY my interpretation, and not that of the entire asexual community. Caveat, caveat, caveat. Let’s move on. I am an asexual woman (just in case you hadn’t noticed by now). I am also a sensual woman. These two identifications are not contradictory for me. My experience of asexuality does not include detachment from my body. Asexuality for me does not inherently mean fear or distaste of things physical. In the same way, it does not mean a distancing of myself from the physicality of other people, especially those towards whom I am affectually attracted. My asexuality also does not mean that I cannot love, am unwilling to love, or am afraid of loving. Asexuality is not aversion.

The post as a whole is trying to do several complex things, so I can’t really do it justice here by excerpting a couple of paragraphs. Do click through to Hypomnemata to read the whole thing.

Commenter Jess left an intriguing question on the comment thread of my sexual fluidity post last week. Since the thread is several weeks old by now — and the question itself opens up a whole new line of discussion — with her permission I am re-posting the comment as an entirely new thread.

Jess writes:

I have a question for the group. My experience lines up with annajcook’s (and the many in comments who’ve agreed) pretty well in terms of discovering a sexuality that’s person-centered and seems independent of gender. For me, it’s difficult to imagine being any other way, and I’m curious what it’s like to be straight or gay. Anyone out there willing to share their experiences? For instance, it’s hard for me to imagine knowing solely on the basis of someone’s gender before I even meet the person that I definitely would never be attracted to them or want a relationship with them. I’m not making the argument “everyone’s a little bit bisexual”- I believe people when they identify themselves as straight or gay, I’m just curious to understand what it’s like.

In an email exchange with me Jess elaborated:

I wrote “I’m curious what it’s like to be straight or gay” and I guess I would add that there are two questions- the first is about the discovery process and the second is about just the day-to-day experience of who one is attracted to & whether one acts differently around people of different genders because of the presence/absence of some sort of sexual tension. I would also add that the first question also applies to bisexual people who had some sort of clear discovery process (in contrast to a lot of the “fluid” identified people who eventually came to a conclusion like you described in your initial post).

A couple of brief observations and then I’ll open the floor for thoughts from the peanut gallery.

Speaking as someone else who is very person-centered and context-specific in their sexual attractions, I second that exclusivity is a confusing concept to wrap your head around if your sexual orientation is not sex- or gender exclusive. I used to be so frustrated when I was a teenager and trying to understand sexual vs. nonsexual attraction: none of the straight folks I spoke with seemed to be able to articulate how it worked. They just knew that’s how their sexuality functioned. So perhaps it is something that can’t really be explained? Yet queer folks are prompted, by their non-normative attractions, to think and talk a lot about the nature of their attractions. We’re asked to explain ourselves. And I actually think we learn a lot about our sexuality in the process. I hope that, as a culture, we’ll increasingly include straight folks in that conversation. Their sexuality isn’t any more “common sense” or self-evident than ours is, and we shouldn’t treat it as such!

My other question concerning sex- and gender-exclusive orientations is where trans* and sex- and gender-nonconforming folks fit into this picture. I’ve noticed some conversations on tumblr recently revolving around the question of whether not being sexually attracted to trans* individuals is transphobic. The question is posed something like this: if a straight woman identifies as someone attracted to men, but does not experience attraction towards a man with a trans history, with a non-gender-conforming or sex-atypical body, etc., is that a manifestation of transphobic feelings?

This obviously raises a huge tangle of questions involving the body and how important the physical organization of one’s body is (or is not) in the alchemy of sexual attraction. My point here is that when we talk about people whose self-identified orientation is exclusive to “men” or “women,” we need to unpack those categories a little and think about what we’re actually talking about. We can’t assume that every person who identifies as a straight male human being is going to have the body that in our minds automatically lines up with that identity.

Without further ado, I open the floor and encourage you to engage with Jess’s questions. Enjoy the conversation!